JOHN PILGER, - New Statesman
Stephan: This is what we look like from the U.K. One has to go to the foreign press to get a sense of proportion as to what is going on in this country.
Thanks to James Spottiswoode.
Obama’s greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US.
Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message.
US President Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message at the start of a ‘Twitter Town Hall’ July 6, 2011. Photograph: Getty Images.
How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot’s horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant’s rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.
Six months later, a PBS official told me: ‘This wasn’t censorship. We’re into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry.’
In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word ‘ban’ was […]
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RAKESH KOCHHAR, Associate Director for Research, Pew Hispanic Center - Pew Research Center Publications
Stephan: It is getting tougher and tougher to be an American woman.
Overview
The sluggish recovery from the Great Recession has been better for men than for women. From the end of the recession in June 2009 through May 2011, men gained 768,000 jobs and lowered their unemployment rate by 1.1 percentage points to 9.5%.1 Women, by contrast, lost 218,000 jobs during the same period, and their unemployment rate increased by 0.2 percentage points to 8.5%, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
These post-recession employment trends are a sharp turnabout from the gender patterns that prevailed during the recession itself, when men lost more than twice as many jobs as women. Men accounted for 5.4 million, or 71%, of the 7.5 million jobs that disappeared from the U.S. economy from December 2007 through June 2009.
Employment trends during the recovery have favored men over women in all but one of the 16 major sectors of the economy identified in this report. In five sectors, notably in retail trade, men have gained jobs while women have lost them. In five other sectors, including education and health services and professional and business services, men gained jobs at a faster rate than women. And in an additional five sectors, such […]
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ERIC W. DOLAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is the latest in the trend which is creating the new American slavery. There is an active movement going on in this country to arrest and jail people for long periods as a way of acquiring prisoner/slaves. It is despicable that this is modern America. If you are a young male of African or Hispanic heritage you are prey.
Prison inmates have replaced union workers in Racine County, Wisconsin, thanks to the changes to the states collective bargaining laws that went into effect at the end of June.
The Journal Times reported prison inmates will now be able to do tasks such as landscaping, painting, and shoveling sidewalks in the winter that were previously performed by unionized employees.
Inmates are not required to do any work for the county, but can receive time off their sentence if they do. Racine County Executive Jim Ladwig said the use of prison labor would not result in any public works staff reductions.
‘We’re gonna have them do landscaping at county buildings, have them pick up trash on the roads,’ he told local Fox News 6. ‘So we can use some of the county personnel to do difficult tasks, such as putting in a parking lot at the park.’
Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed a non-fiscal version of his budget plan into law in March that stripped nearly all collective bargaining rights from Wisconsin public workers, giving officials the power to make many changes affecting workers without formal negotiations.
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LISA BAERTLEIN, - Reuters
Stephan: Those states whose culture is shaped by rightwing Fundamentalist Christianity are, based on data, not theory or ideology, slowly killing themselves, and experiencing a lower quality of life in the process. Divorce, spousal abuse, teen pregnancy, STDs, diabetes, life span, general social violence, racism, and a long list of other dysfunctional social manifestations are most prevalent in those states.
LOS ANGELES — The number of obese U.S. adults rose in 16 states in the last year, helping to push obesity rates in a dozen states above 30 percent, according to a report released on Thursday.
By that measure, Mississippi is the fattest state in the union with an adult obesity rate of 34.4 percent. Colorado is the least obese — with a rate of 19.8 percent — and the only state with an adult obesity rate below 20 percent, according to ‘F as in Fat,’ an annual report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
While the number of states showing significant year-over-year increases in obesity has been slowing, no state chalked up an actual decline. Even Colorado does not win high marks — its score means one in five state residents is at higher risk for conditions like heart disease and diabetes.
‘Today, the state with the lowest adult obesity rate would have had the highest rate in 1995,’ said Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust for America’s Health.
Four years ago, only one U.S. state had an adult obesity rate above 30 percent, according to the report, which defines adult obesity as a having a […]
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SEAN SAVETT, - Think Progress
Stephan: This is the latest in the trend moving the wealth of the middle class up to the uber-rich and corporations.
After the longest recession since WWII, many Americans are still struggling while S&P 500 corporations are sitting on $800 billion in cash and making massive profits. Now, economists from Northeastern University have released a study that finds our sluggish economic recovery has almost solely benefited corporations. According to the study:
‘Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income.
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